An electronic document may include characters (e.g., text and non-text objects) composed of numbers, letters, or the like. For example, the electronic document may be a scan of a page. As another example, the electronic document may be a photograph of a person's writing with characters. These characters are rarely organized in a format that is easy to read or manipulate in page description languages, making it difficult for text processing devices to determine the geometry of the group of characters. This formatting can also make it difficult to generate a high-level representation of the characters that can be included in an electronic document (e.g., word processing document, spreadsheet, slide show, webpage, etc.). Regardless, users still wish to have text processing devices that easily read (recognize) and manipulate characters in an electronic document.